In this issue of Quality in Higher Education, discussion ranges widely and engages with continuing and current issues facing the sector. Articles explore the role of the individual in implementing and developing quality assurance processes, the impact of imported quality assurance practice on local higher education, the impact of quality assurance policy and the issue of whether quality assurance can be applied to cover activities other than learning and teaching.
The role of individuals in developing and implementing quality assurance processes is explored in two articles in this issue. Mari Elken and Bjørn Stensaker explore the relevance of the notion of ‘quality work’ as a way of understanding quality assurance processes. They argue that individual ‘actors’ and their actions are vital to understanding the development of such processes. Similarly, in her exploration of the extent and impact of the Bologna process on local quality assurance approaches in Slovenia, Maruša Hauptman Komotar highlights the importance of the individual preferences of local politicians to how the processes were implemented in practice. Komotar questions the extent to which there is convergence of quality assurance policies and practices across the EHEA region.
In another paper, Burcu Tezcan-Unal, Kalman Winston and Anne Qualter explore the influence of US-based accreditation on an Arabic higher education institution and its development as a learning organisation. They argue that external quality assurance continues to have potential to enable higher education institutions to become effective learning organisations but that there are two major internal influences on this process. First, they highlight local, existential and institutional changes in influencing improvement; second, they emphasise the importance of support from the institutional leadership in facilitating improvement.
The question of how much impact quality assurance policies actually have on higher education has long been the ‘elephant in the room’ in discussions about quality in higher education. In this issue, Angela Yung Chi Hou, Chao Yu Kuo, Karen Hui Jung Chen, Christopher Hill, Shaw Ren Lin, Jackson Chih Chun-Chi and Hua Chi Chou highlight specific impacts of the implementation of a new quality assurance policy in Taiwan. In particular, they highlight the inconsistency of existing processes and demonstrate that in Taiwan, quality assurance has highlighted the lack of adequate resourcing for institutional quality assurance, the need for consistency in application and clearly defined roles and responsibilities for external quality assurance.
The importance of the ‘long view’ is often overlooked in quality assurance, especially where the personnel with responsibility for quality processes seem to be notably transitory. Historical studies of different national experiences of quality assurance processes are, therefore, a useful way of reflecting and learning from those experiences. In this issue, Aijing Chu and Don F. Westerheijden describe the long-term experience of the Netherlands, which has had one of the longer journeys in quality assurance. They highlight the specific and general challenges faced over time by the Netherlands in developing quality assurance in higher education and the particular tensions between governmental tendencies to control higher education and concerns to improve quality and develop a genuine quality culture within institutions.
Expanding quality assurance to apply to research, development and innovation activity of universities is seldom part of the quality assurance process. In this issue, Matti Kajaste analyses quality audit reports from Finnish universities of applied sciences and explores the quality management of their research, development and innovation activities. Kajaste finds that these institutions are trying to find ways of enlarging the volume of such activity and this is reflected in the ways in which they manage quality. Kajaste argues that their focus is on the project proposal preparation phase and strategic direction of resources, while less attention has been paid to monitoring and developing the quality of the output.
Overall, these articles demonstrate that there are few simple solutions to the perennial challenges of quality assurance in higher education. They highlight that there is a need for constant research and reflection on quality assurance and its implications.